CATL’S 100GWh gigafactory in Hungary starts battery trial production following temporary closure

News

The world's largest EV battery manufacturer joins the scramble for production space in Central Eastern Europe.

GE

George East

28 September 2026 · 2 min read

CATL, the world’s largest EV battery and energy storage manufacturer, began trial production at its newly built cell manufacturing gigafactory in Debrecen, Hungary, towards the end of September, 2026.

This means the Chinese manufacturing giant has met all necessary preconditions and regulatory requirements for what is essentially a trial period, where equipment is optimised and validated ahead of full-scale series production.

The €7.3 billion facility’s first two production lines are now operational for testing and are operating at a capacity of 34 GWh. As of autumn 2024, CATL’s Debrecen site has built over 537,000 battery modules. Since the firm’s foundation in 2011, CATL batteries have been fitted to more than 17 million vehicles globally. CATL-using manufacturers include Tesla, Volkswagen, Porsche, Audi, Kia, Changan, and Stellantis.

With a 100 gigawatt-hour (GWh) capacity, the Debrecen plant will be CATL’s largest outside China. For context, a 1 GWh capacity factory can make enough batteries for some 17,000 vehicles.

Earlier this year, local authorities from Debrecen’s surrounding Hajdu-Bihar county ordered a temporary shutdown of certain zones of the factory due to safety concerns when nine employees were exposed to nickel. CATL then implemented several health and safety changes, which the authorities confirmed met the correct regulatory frameworks.

CATL is the latest EV player to join what appears to be a gold rush for manufacturing and production space in the Central and Eastern European (CEE) region. Also in Debrecen, Chinese battery specialists, EVE, have confirmed it will build a 30GWh factory next to the BMW plant where the new BMW iX3 is built.

By the end of this year, BYD has promised to open a production site in the Hungarian town of Szeged to circumnavigate European Union tariffs on Chinese-made vehicles. Meanwhile, Toyota promises to build its next EV at its Kolín factory in the Czech Republic.

In 2008, Ford built a factory in Craiova, Romania. At present, the facility manufactures the all-electric Puma Gen-E, E-Tourneo Courier, and E-Transit Courier. The Mercedes-Benz GLC’s electric drive system is also Romanian-made.